The theme was, as you might guess, TARGETING…specifically, the promise of providing more relevant ads online and the ecosystem of companies emerging to help fulfill that. The day’s panels and sessions covered a number of topics – data proliferation, social media targeting, what it really means to “buy audience”, etc.

In particular, I enjoyed a late-morning panel on ad networks – interestingly enough, the, ah, interactions of a couple of the panelists showed me just how much publishers distrust exchanges. I liked the social media targeting panel as well: the participants cast more of vision for where things are headed versus where they are. Rob Key of Converseon talked about eventually being able to draw correlations between changes in online sentiment and changes in real business metrics such as sales. Probably a bit early to do this now, but once more data points exist, the thought leaders will be able to use econometrics and other advanced analytics to build causal relationships and ultimately integrate social media marketing more fully into the broader marketing mix.

As always, I liked the networking most. Digiday attracts a good conference crowd: when I was at MRM, I always felt that vendors were more interested in conversation for the sake of conversation (as opposed to for the sake of selling) than at other events. This time around, more folks stuck around for the happy hour than usual…not sure if there’s anything to take away from that, but it made for good conversation.

In thinking of what could make this an even better experience, I had a couple of thoughts:

• I like the fact that they hand everyone an attendee list upon registration, but it would be nice to know who’s coming in advance of the event itself. In particular, I’m thinking that using an Eventbrite-like tool, where you can see attendees updated in real-time, would be useful. Eventbrite is especially nice because it allows attendees to enter their website and Twitter info – this could enable conversations in advance of the conference itself. Am I crazy, or would this be useful?
• Digiday would benefit from audience participation going beyond Q&A at the end of each session. What if they crowdsourced an entire panel and discussion (both topic and participants), either prior to the event or at the event itself? Or, give the audience polling devices or a site by which they can give a quick 1-5 rating on each panel. All easier said than done, with the point being that more interactivity is a good thing.

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It’s an interesting point. Makes me wonder – just how attached am I to the iPhone? In fact, what the iPhone has done is make me more attached to the underlying digital properties that are now much easier to access: Twitter, Wordpress, Google Reader, Pandora…hell, I even started a tumblelog just because I downloaded the Tumblr app on a whim one day…so whether or not I’m addicted to the device, the iPhone has definitely cemented my status as a digi-junkie.

Now if you’ll excuse me, my friends are wondering when I’ll return to our real-life conversation.

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We covered a range of topics, beginning with the question “Do blogging and tweeting require different skill sets?” This morphed into a conversation on macro-blogging (i.e. – blogging) vs. microblogging, with different participants offering analogies to compare the two. I found the perceived connections between the two fascinating, and it’s affecting my approach to blogging (as in, I’m trying to do it more). When one user pointed out the difficulty in creating (via blogging) versus joining (via tweeting) an interesting conversation, another responded that Twitter can in fact help create interesting conversations for a blog.

Along those lines, my favorite conversation centered on the question of “What comes first – content, conversation or community?” Personally, I don’t think you can have conversation or community without content to stimulate it. There were of course different perspectives, and one person put it best by saying that conversations are in themselves forms of content which can stimulate further conversations and fuel community.

(You can see the full conversation here)

I should point out that I found the conversation easiest to follow using the TweetChat application. It makes following the conversation around a particular meme a snap – you can set the update time down to 5 seconds, making the conversation nearly real-time.

To the extent I’m able, I definitely plan to join the UnPanel on a weekly basis. If there are folks out there interested in similar chats on topics like mobile apps, smartphone platforms or other forms of emerging media, I’d be interested in talking about how we can set something up that would be compelling enough to draw a large audience. Heck, I’d even be willing to talk about the sputtering Minnesota Twins…

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